Philosophymagazine

There can be no
other truth to take off from this—I think, therefore I exist—ie. the
Cartesian cogito.There we have
the absolute truth of consciousness becoming aware of itself.Every theory which takes man out of the moment in which he becomes
aware of himself is, at its very beginning, a theory which confounds the
truth, for outside the Cartesian cogito, all views are only probable, and a
doctrine of probability which is not bound to a truth dissolves into thin
air.In order to describe the
probable, you must have a firm hold on the true.Therefore, before there can be any truth whatsoever, there must be an
absolute truth; and this one is easily arrived at; it is on everyone’s
doorstep; it is a matter of grasping it directly.

—Jean-Paul
Sartre

Conscious
is the perceptual apparatus by which we comprehend reality and the essence
of reality is fundamentally different than our conscious perception of it.

—Christopher
Bek

Forward—Bad
faith is the technical term
coined by Kierkegaard's
wayward twentieth-century disciple Jean-Paul Sartre which the state of human inauthenticity where one attempts to flee
from freedom, responsibility and anguish. It
is a paradoxical and therefore ultimately schizophrenic attempt at self-deception.

To live in good faith means to strive for authenticity and to
continually be aware of the tendency to slip into bad faith.

Nobody
had shaken the world of science more than Einstein—and now came along
another young upstart German in Heisenberg with still another attack on
classical physics.

Brennan—Richard

Churchill
was so angry that Niels Bohr had managed to influence Roosevelt that he
demanded Bohr be arrested—but then grumpily settled for keeping Bohr and
anyone under his influence under surveillance.

—Richard
Brennan

In
1936 the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Johannes Stark and his followers
unleashed a newspaper assault in Germany against Jewish physics, by which he
meant theoretical physics, which he contrasted with German or experimental
physics.

—Richard
Brennan

In this vast cosmic
picture the abyss between macrocosmos and microcosmos—the very big and the
very little—will be bridged, and the whole complex of the universe will
resolve into a homogeneous fabric in which matter and energy are
indistinguishable and all forms of motion from the slow wheeling of the
galaxies to the wild flight of electrons become simply changes in the
structure and concentration of the primordial field.

The human
being is not only the being by whom négatités are disclosed in the world;
he is also the one who can take negative attitudes with respect to himself.
In our Introduction we defined consciousness as "a being such that in
its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being
other than itself." But now that we have examined the meaning of
"the question," we can at present also write the formula thus:
"Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of
the nothingness of its being." In a prohibition or a veto, for example,
the human being denies a future transcendence. But this negation is not
explicative. My consciousness is not restricted to envisioning a négatité.
It constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihilation of a possibility
which another human reality projects as its possibility. For that reason it
must arise in the world as a Not; it is as a Not that the slave first
apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the
guard who is watching him. There are even men (eg. caretakers, overseers,
gaolers) whose social reality is uniquely that of the Not, who will live and
die, having forever been only a Not upon the earth. Others so as to make the
Not a part of their very subjectivity, establish their human personality as
a perpetual negation. This is the meaning and function of what Scheler calls
"the man of resentment"—in reality, the Not. But there exist more
subtle behaviors, the description of which will lead us further into the
inwardness of consciousness. Irony is one of these. In irony a man
annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to
believe in order not to be belied he affirms to deny and denies to affirm;
fie creates a positive object but it has no being other than its
nothingness. Thus attitudes of negation toward the self permit us to raise a
new question: What are we to say is the being of man who has the possibility
of denying himself? But it is out of the question to discuss the attitude of
"self-negation" in its universality. The kinds of behavior which
can be ranked under this heading are too diverse; we risk retaining only the
abstract form of them. It is best to choose and to examine one determined
attitude which is essential to human reality and which is such that
consciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward
itself. This attitude, it seems to me, is bad faith (mauvaise foi).

Frequently
this is identified with falsehood. We say indifferently of a person that he
shows signs of bad faith or that he lies to himself. We shall willingly
grant that bad faith is a lie to oneself, on condition that we distinguish
the lie to oneself from lying in general. Lying is a negative attitude, we
will agree to that. But this negation does not bear on consciousness itself;
it aims only at the transcendent. The essence of the lie implies in fact
that the liar is actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is
hiding. A man does not lie about what he is ignorant of; he does not lie
when he spreads an error of which he himself is the dupe; he does not lie
when he is mistaken. The ideal description of the liar would be a cynical
consciousness, affirming truth within himself, denying it in his words, and
denying that negation as such. Now this doubly negative attitude rests on
the transcendent; the fact expressed is transcendent since it does not
exist, and the original negation rests on a truth; that is, on a particular
type of transcendence. As for the inner negation which I effect
correlatively with the affirmation for myself of the truth, this rests on
words; that is, on an event in the world. Furthermore the inner disposition
of the liar is positive; it could be the object of an affirmative judgment.
The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek to hide this intention from
himself nor to disguise the translucency of consciousness; on the contrary,
he has recourse to it when there is a question of deciding secondary
behavior. It explicitly exercises a regulatory control over all attitudes.
As for his flaunted intention of telling the truth ("I'd never want to
deceive you! This is true! I swear it!")—all this, of course, is the
object of an inner negation, but also it is not recognized by the liar as
his intention. It is played, imitated, it is the Intention of the character
which he plays in the eyes of his questioner, but this character, precisely
because he does not exist) is a transcendent. Thus the lie does not put into
the play the inner structure of present consciousness; all the negations
which constitute it bear on objects which by this fact are removed from
consciousness. The lie then does not require special ontological foundation,
and the explanations which the existence of negation in general requires are
valid without change in the case of deceit. Of course we have described the
ideal lie; doubtless it happens often enough that the liar is more or less
the victim of his lie, that he half persuades himself of it. But these
common, popular forms of the lie are also degenerate aspects of it; they
represent intermediaries between falsehood and bad faith. The lie is a
behavior of transcendence.

The lie is
also a normal phenomenon of what Heidegger calls the "Mit-sein." l
It presupposes my existence, the existence of the Other) my existence for
the Other, and the existence of the Other for me. Thus there is no
difficulty in holding that the liar must make the project of the lie in
entire clarity and that he must possess a complete comprehension of the lie
and of the truth which he is altering. It is sufficient that an over-all
opacity hide his intentions from the Other; it is sufficient that the Other
can take the lie for truth. By the lie consciousness affirms that it exists
by nature as hidden from the Other; it utilizes for its own profit the
ontological duality of myself and myself in the eyes of the Other.

The situation
cannot be the same for bad faith if this, as we have said, is indeed a lie
to oneself. To be sure, the one who practices bad faith is hiding a
displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth. Bad faith then
has in appearance the structure of falsehood. Only what changes everything
is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.
Thus the duality of the deceiver and the deceived does not exist here. Bad
faith on the contrary implies in essence the unity of a single
consciousness. This does not mean that it can not be conditioned by the
Mit-sein like all other phenomena of human reality, but the Mit-sein can
call forth bad faith only by presenting itself as a situation which bad
faith permits surpassing; bad faith does not come from outside to human
reality. One does not undergo his bad faith; one is not infected with it; it
is not a state. But consciousness affects itself with bad faith. There must
be an original intention and a project of bad faith; this project implies a
comprehension of bad faith as such and a prereflective apprehension of
consciousness as affecting itself with bad faith. It follows first that the
one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same
person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth
which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived. Better yet I
must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully—and
this not at two different moments, which at a pinch would allow us to
reestablish a semblance of duality—but in the unitary structure of a single
project. How then can the lie subsist if the duality which conditions it is
suppressed?

To this
difficulty is added another which is derived from the total translucency of
consciousness. That which affects itself with bad faith must be conscious of its bad faith since the being of consciousness is consciousness of
being. It appears then that I must be in good faith, at least to the extent
that I am conscious of my bad faith; But then this whole psychic system is
annihilated. We must agree in fact that if I deliberately and cynically
attempt to lie to myself, I fail completely in this undertaking; the lie
falls back and collapses beneath my look; it is ruined from behind by the
very consciousness of lying to myself which pitilessly constitutes itself
well within my project as its very condition. We have here an evanescent
phenomenon which exists only in and through its own differentiation. To be
sure, these phenomena are frequent and we shall see that there is in fact an
"evanescence" of bad faith, which, it is evident, vacillates
continually between good faith and cynicism: Even though the existence of
bad faith is very precarious, and though it belongs to the kind of psychic
structures which we might call "metastable," it presents
nonetheless an autonomous and durable form. It can even be the normal aspect
of life for a very great number of people. A person can live in bad faith,
which does not mean that he does not have abrupt awakenings to cynicism or
to good faith, but which implies a constant and particular style of life.
Our embarrassment then appears extreme since we can neither reject nor
comprehend bad faith.

To escape from
these difficulties people gladly have recourse to the unconscious. In the
psychoanalytic interpretation, for example, they use the hypothesis of a
censor, conceived as a line of demarcation with customs, passport division,
currency control, etc., to reestablish the duality of the deceiver and the
deceived. Here instinct or, if you prefer, original drives and complexes of
drives constituted by our individual history, make up reality. It is neither
true nor false since it does not exist for itself. It simply is exactly
like this table, which is neither true nor false in itself but simply real.
As for the conscious symbols of the instinct, this interpretation takes them
not for appearances but for real psychic facts. Fear, forgetting, dreams
exist really in the capacity of concrete facts of consciousness in the same
way as the words and the attitudes of the liar are concrete, really existing
patterns of behavior. The subject has the same relation to these phenomena
as the deceived to the behavior of the deceiver. He establishes them in
their reality and must interpret them. There is a truth in the activities of
the deceiver; if the deceived could reattach them to the situation where the
deceiver establishes himself and to his project of the lie, they would
become integral parts of truth, by virtue of being lying conduct. Similarly
there is a truth in the symbolic acts; it is what the psychoanalyst
discovers when he reattaches them to the historical situation of the
patient, to the unconscious complexes which they express, to the blocking of
the censor. Thus the subject deceives himself about the meaning of his
conduct, he apprehends it in its concrete existence but not in its truth,
simply because he cannot derive it from an original situation and from a
psychic constitution which remain alien to him.

By the
distinction between the "id" and the "ego", Freud has
cut the psychic whole into two. I am the ego but I am not the id. I hold no
privileged position in relation to my unconscious psyche. I am my own
psychic phenomena in so far as I establish them in their conscious reality.
For example I am the impulse to steal this or that book from this bookstall.
I am an integral part of the impulse; I bring it to light and I determine
myself hand-in-hand with it to commit the theft. But I am not those psychic
facts, in so far as I receive them passively and am obliged to resort to
hypotheses about their origin and their true meaning, just as the scholar
makes conjectures about the nature and essence of an external phenomenon.
This theft, for example, which I interpret as an immediate impulse
determined by the rarity, the interest, or the price of the volume which I
am going to steal—it is in truth a process derived from self-punishment,
which is attached more or less directly to an Oedipus complex. The impulse
toward the theft contains a truth which can be reached only by more or less
probable hypotheses. The criterion of this truth will be the number of
conscious psychic facts which it explains; from a more pragmatic point of
view it will be also the success of the psychiatric cure which it allows.
Finally the discovery of this truth will necessitate the cooperation of the
psychoanalyst, who appears as the mediator between my unconscious drives and
my conscious life. The Other appears as being able to affect the synthesis
between the unconscious thesis and the conscious antithesis. I can know
myself only through the mediation of the other, which means that I stand in
relation to my "id," in the position of the Other. If I have a
little knowledge of psychoanalysis, I can, under circumstances particularly
favorable, try to psychoanalyze myself. But this attempt can succeed only if
I distrust every kind of intuition, only if I apply to my case from the
outside) abstract schemes and rules already learned. As for the results,
whether they are obtained by my efforts alone or with the cooperation of a
technician, they will never have the certainty which intuition confers; they
will possess simply the always-increasing probability of scientific
hypotheses. The hypothesis of the Oedipus complex, like the atomic theory,
is nothing but an "experimental idea"; as Pierce said. it is not
to be distinguished from the totality of experiences which it allows to be
realized and the results which it enables us to foresee. Thus psychoanalysis
substitutes for the notion of bad faith, the idea of a lie without a liar;
it allows me to understand how it is possible for me to be lied to without
lying to myself since it places me in the same relation to myself that the
Other is in respect to me; it replaces the duality of the deceiver and the
deceived, the essential condition of the lie, by that of the "id"
and the "ego." It introduces into my subjectivity the deepest
inter-subjective structure of the Mit-sein. Can this explanation satisfy us?

Considered
more closely the psychoanalytic theory is not as simple as it first appears.
It is not accurate to hold that the "id" is presented as a thing
in relation to the hypothesis of the psychoanalyst, for a thing is
indifferent to the conjectures which we make concerning it, while the
"id" on the contrary is sensitive to them when we approach the
truth. Freud in fact reports resistance when at the end of the first period
the doctor is approaching the truth. This resistance is objective behavior
apprehended from without: the patient shows defiance, refuses to speak,
gives fantastic accounts of his dreams, sometimes even removes himself
completely from the psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask
what part of himself can thus resist. It can not be the "Ego,"
envisaged as a psychic totality of the facts of consciousness; this could
not suspect that the psychiatrist is approaching the end since the ego's
relation to the meaning of its own reactions is exactly like that of the
psychiatrist himself. At the very most it is possible for the ego to
appreciate objectively the degree of probability in the hypotheses set
forth, as a witness of the psychoanalysis might be able to do, according to
the number of subjective facts which they explain. Furthermore, this
probability would appear to the ego to border on certainty, which he could
not take offense at since most of the time it is he who by a conscious
decision is in pursuit of the psychoanalytic therapy. Are we to say that the
patient is disturbed by the daily revelations which the psychoanalyst makes
to him and that he seeks to remove himself, at the same time pretending in
his own eyes to wish to continue the treatment? In this case it is no longer
possible to resort to the unconscious to explain bad faith; it is there in
full consciousness, with all its contradictions. But this is not the way
that the psychoanalyst means to explain this resistance; for him it is
secret and deep, it comes from afar; it has its roots in the very thing
which the psychoanalyst is trying to make clear.

Furthermore it
is equally impossible to explain the resistance as emanating from the
complex which the psychoanalyst wishes to bring to light. The complex as
such is rather the collaborator of the psychoanalyst since it aims at
expressing itself in clear consciousness, since it plays tricks on the
censor and seeks to elude it. The only level on which we can locate the
refusal of the subject is that of the censor. It alone can comprehend the
questions or the revelations of the psychoanalyst as approaching more or
less near to the real drives which it strives to repress—it alone because it
alone knows what it is repressing. If we reject the language and the
materialistic mythology of psychoanalysis, we perceive that the censor in
order to apply its activity with discernment must know what it is
repressing. In fact if we abandon all the metaphors representing the
repression as the impact of blind forces, we are compelled to admit that the
censor must choose and in order to choose must be aware of so doing. How
could it happen otherwise that the censor allows lawful sexual impulses to
pass through, that it permits needs (hunger, thirst, sleep) to be expressed
in clear consciousness? And how are we to explain that it can relax its
surveillance, that it can even be deceived by the disguises of the instinct?
But it is not sufficient that it discern the condemned drives; it must also
apprehend them as to be repressed) which implies in it at the very least an
awareness of its activity. In a word, how could the censor discern the
impulses needing to be repressed without being- conscious of discerning
them? How Can we conceive of a knowledge which is ignorant of itself? To
know is to know that one knows, said Alain. Let us say rather: All-knowing
is consciousness of knowing. Thus the resistant the patient implies on the
level Of the censor an awareness of the thing repressed as such, a
comprehension of the end toward which the questions of the psychoanalyst are
leading, and an act of synthetic connection by which it compares the truth
of the repressed complex to the psychoanalytic hypothesis which aims at it.
These various operations in their turn imply that the censor is conscious of itself. But what type of self-consciousness can the censor have? It
must be the consciousness of being conscious of the drive to be repressed,
but precisely in order not be conscious of it. What does this mean if not
that the censor is in bad faith?

Psychoanalysis
not gained anything for us since in order to overcome bad faith, it has
established between the unconscious and consciousness an autonomous
consciousness in bad faith. The effort to establish a veritable duality and
even a trinity (Es, Ich, Ueberich expressing themselves through the censor)
has resulted in a mere verbal terminology. The very essence of the reflexive
idea of hiding something from oneself implies the unity of one and the same
psychic mechanism and consequently a double activity in the heart of unity,
tending on the one hand to maintain and locate the thing to be concealed and
on the other hand to repress and disguise it. Each of the two aspects of
this activity is complementary to the other; that is, it implies the other
in its being. By separating- consciousness from the unconscious by means of
the censor, psychoanalysis has not succeeded in dissociating the two phases
of the act, since the libido is a blind conatus toward conscious expression
and since the conscious phenomenon is a passive, faked result.
Psychoanalysis has merely localized this double activity of repulsion and
attraction on the level of the censor.

Furthermore
the problem still remains of accounting for the unity of the total
phenomenon (repression of the drive which disguises itself and
"passes" in symbolic form), to establish comprehensible
connections among its different phases. How can the repressed drive
"disguise itself" if it does not include (I) the consciousness of
being repressed, (2) the consciousness of having been pushed back because it
is what it is, (3) a project of disguise? No mechanistic theory of
condensation or of transference can explain these modifications by which the
drive itself is affected, for the description of the process of disguise
implies a veiled appeal to finality. And similarly how are we to account for
the pleasure or the anguish which accompanies the symbolic and conscious
satisfaction of the drive if consciousness does not include—beyond the
censor—an obscure comprehension of the end to be attained as simultaneously
desired and forbidden. By rejecting the conscious unity of the psyche, Freud
is obliged to imply everywhere a magic unity linking distant phenomena
across obstacles, just as sympathetic magic unites the spellbound person and
the wax image fashioned in his likeness. The unconscious drive (Trieb)
through magic is endowed with the character "repressed" or
"condemned," which completely pervades it, colors it, and
magically provokes its symbolism. Similarly the conscious phenomenon is
entirely colored by its symbolic meaning although it cannot apprehend this
meaning by itself in clear consciousness.

Aside from its
inferiority in principle, the explanation by magic does not avoid the
coexistence—on the level of the unconscious, on that of the censor, and on
that of consciousness—of two contradictory, complementary structures which
reciprocally imply and destroy each other. Proponents of the theory have
hypostasized and "reified" bad faith; they have not escaped it.
This is what has inspired a Viennese psychiatrist, Stekel, to depart from
the psychoanalytical tradition and to write in La femme frigide: "Every
time that I have been able to carry my investigations far enough, I have
established that the crux of the psychosis was conscious." In addition
the cases which he reports in his work bear witness to a pathological bad
faith which the Freudian doctrine cannot account for. There is the question,
for example, of women whom marital infidelity has made frigid; that is, they
succeed in hiding from themselves not complexes deeply sunk in half
psychological darkness, but acts of conduct which are objectively
discoverable, which they can not fail to record at the moment when they
perform them. Frequently in fact the husband reveals to Stekel that his wife
has given objective signs of pleasure, but the woman when questioned will
fiercely deny them.

Here we find a
pattern of distraction. Admissions which Stekel was able to draw out inform
us that these pathologically frigid women apply themselves to becoming
distracted in advance from the pleasure which they dread; many for example
at the time of the sexual act, turn their thoughts away toward their daily
occupations, make up their household accounts. Will anyone speak of an
unconscious here? Yet if the frigid woman thus distracts her consciousness
from the pleasure which she experiences, it is by no means cynically and in
full agreement with herself; it is in order to prove to herself that she is
frigid. We have in fact to deal with a phenomenon of bad faith since the
efforts taken in order not to be present to the experienced pleasure imply
the recognition that the pleasure is experienced; they imply it in order to
deny it. But we are no longer on the ground of psychoanalysis. Thus on the
one hand the explanation by means of the unconscious, due to the fact that
it breaks the psychic unity, cannot account for the facts which at first
sight it appeared to explain. And on the other hand, there exists an
infinity of types of behavior in bad faith which explicitly reject this kind
of explanation because their essence implies that they can appear only in
the translucency of consciousness. We find is still untouched.

Sweet and bitter, cold and warm as well as all the colors, all these
things exist but in opinion and not in reality—what really exists are
unchangeable particles, atoms, and their motions in empty space.

—Democritus

According to the
Cartesian cogito, the one truth that is safe and secure from any
doubt is that of my own existence as a conscious subject—thereby
introducing subjectivity into modern philosophy.

—Thelma
Lavine

On a visit to
Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I
could not make it out.From
where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace
of them on my map.When finally
an interpreter came to help me, he said—We don’t show churches on our
maps.Contradicting him, I
pointed to one that was very clearly marked.For which he responded—That is a museum and not a living church,
which we don’t show.It then
occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which
failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes.All through school and university I had been given maps of life and
knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of the things that I most cared
about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the
conduct of my life.I
remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete—and no
interpreter had come along to help me.It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my
perceptions and began instead to suspect the soundness of the maps.

If we wish to
get out of this difficulty, we should examine more closely the patterns of
bad faith and attempt a description of them. This description will permit us
perhaps to fix more exactly the conditions for the possibility of bad faith;
that is, to reply to the question we raised at the outset: "What must
be the being of man if he is to be capable of bad faith?"

Take the
example of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man for the
first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking
to her cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be necessary
sooner or later for her to make a decision. But she does not want to realize
the urgency; she concerns herself only with what is respectful and discreet
in the attitude of her companion. She does not apprehend this conduct as an
attempt to achieve what we call "the first approach"; that is, she
does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct
presents. She restricts this behavior to what is in the present; she does
not wish to read in the phrases which he addresses to her anything other
than their explicit meaning. If he says to her, "I find you so
attractive"! she disarms this phrase of its sexual background; she
attaches to the conversation and to the behavior of the speaker, the
immediate meanings, which she imagines as objective qualities. The man who
is speaking to her appears to her sincere and respectful as the table is
round or square, as the wall coloring is blue or gray. The qualities thus
attached to the person she is listening to are in this way fixed in a
permanence like that of things, which is no other than the projection of the
strict present of the qualities into the temporal flux. This is because she
does not quite know what she wants. She is profoundly aware of the desire
which she inspires, but the desire cruel and naked would humiliate and
horrify her. Yet she would find no charm in a respect which would be only
respect. In order to satisfy her, there must be a feeling which is addressed
wholly to her personality—ie. to her full freedom—and which would be a
recognition of her freedom. But at the same time this feeling must be wholly
desire; that is, it must address itself to her body as object. This time
then she refuses to apprehend the desire for what it is; she does not even
give it a name; she recognizes it only to the extent that it transcends
itself toward admiration, esteem, respect and that it is wholly absorbed in
the more refined forms which it produces, to the extent of no longer
figuring anymore as a sort of warmth and density. But then suppose he takes
her hand. This act of her companion risks changing the situation by calling
for an immediate decision. To leave the hand there is to consent in herself
to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to break the troubled and
unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to postpone the
moment of decision as long as possible. We know what happens next; the young
woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it.
She does not notice because it happens by chance that she is at this moment
all intellect. She draws her companion up to the most lofty regions of
sentimental speculation; she speaks of Life, of her life, she shows herself
in her essential aspect—a personality, a consciousness. And during this time
the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand that the
problem which we had attempted to resolve rests inert between the warm hands
of her companion—neither consenting nor resisting—a thing.

We shall say
that this woman is in bad faith. But we see immediately that she uses
various procedures in order to maintain herself in this bad faith. She has
disarmed the actions of her companion by reducing them to being only what
they are; that is, to existing in the mode of the in-itself. But she permits
herself to enjoy his desire, to the extent that she will apprehend it as not
being what it is, will recognize its transcendence. Finally while sensing
profoundly the presence of her own body—to the degree of being disturbed
perhaps—she realizes herself as not being her own body, and she contemplates
it as though from above as a passive object to which events can happen but
which can neither provoke them nor avoid them because all its possibilities
are outside of it. What unity do we find in these various aspects of bad
faith? It is a certain art of forming contradictory concepts which unite in
themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea. The basic concept
which is thus engendered, utilizes the double property of the human being,
who is at once a facticity and a transcendence. These two aspects of human
reality are and ought to be capable of a valid coordination. But bad faith
does not wish either to coordinate them nor to surmount them in a synthesis.
Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences.
It must affirm facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being
facticity, in. such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the
one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other.

We can find
the prototype of formulae of bad faith in certain famous expressions which
have been rightly conceived to produce their whole effect in a spirit of bad
faith. Take for example the title of a work by Jacques Chardonne, Love Is
Much More than Love" We see here how unity is established between
present love in its facticity—"the contact of two skins,"
sensuality, egoism, Proust's mechanism of jealousy, Adler's battle of the
sexes) etc.—and love as transcendence—Mauriac's "river of fire,"
the longing for the infinite, Plato's eros, Lawrence's deep cosmic
intuition, etc. Here we leave facticity to find ourselves suddenly beyond
the present and the factual condition of man, beyond the psychological, in
the heart of metaphysics. On the other hand, the title of a play by Sarment,
I Am Too Great for Myself, which also presents characters in bad faith,
throws us first into full transcendence in order suddenly to imprison us
within the narrow limits of our factual essence. We will discover this
structure again in the famous sentence: "He has become what he
was" or in its no less famous opposite: "Eternity at last changes
each man into himself." It is well understood that these various
formulae have only the appearance of bad faith; they have been conceived in
this paradoxical form explicitly to shock the mind and discountenance it by
an enigma. But it is precisely this appearance which "is of concern to
us. What counts here is that the formulae do not constitute new, solidly
structured ideas; on the contrary, they are formed so as to remain in
perpetual disintegration and so that we may slide at any time from
naturalistic present to transcendence and vice versa.

We can see the
use which bad faith can make of these judgments which all aim at
establishing that I am not what I am. If I were only what I am) I could, for
example, seriously consider an adverse criticism which someone makes of me,
question myself scrupulously, and perhaps be compelled to recognize the
truth in it. But thanks to transcendence, I am not subject to all that I am.
I do not even have to discuss the justice of the reproach. As Suzanne says
to Figaro, "To prove that I am right would be to recognize that I can
be wrong." I am on a plane where no reproach can touch me since what I
really am is my transcendence. I flee from myself, I escape myself, I leave
my tattered garment in the hands of the faultfinder. But the ambiguity
necessary for bad faith comes from the fact that I affirm here that I am my
transcendence in the mode of being of a thing. It is only thus, in fact,
that I can feel that I escape all reproaches. It is in the sense that our
young woman purifies the desire of anything humiliating by being willing to
consider it only as pure transcendence, which she avoids even naming. But
inversely "I Am Too Great for Myself," while showing our
transcendence changed into facticity, is the source of an infinity of
excuses for our failures or our weaknesses. Similarly the young coquette
maintains transcendence to the extent that the respect, the esteem
manifested by the actions of her admirer are already on the plane of the
transcendent. But she arrests this transcendence, she glues it down with all
the facticity of the present; respect is nothing other than respect, it is
an arrested surpassing which no longer surpasses itself toward anything.

But although
this metastable concept of "transcendence-facticity" is one of the
most basic instruments of bad faith, it is not the only one of its kind. We
can equally well use another kind of duplicity derived from human reality
which we will express roughly by saying that its being-for-itself implies
complementarily a being-for-others. Upon any one of my conducts it is always
possible to converge two looks, mine and that of the Other. The conduct will
not present exactly the same structure in each case. But as we shall see
later, as each look perceives it, there is between these two aspects of my
being, no difference between appearance and being—as if I were to my self
the truth of myself and as if the Other possessed only a deformed image of
me. The equal dignity of being, possessed by my being-for-others and by my
being-for-myself permits a perpetually disintegrating synthesis and a
perpetual game of escape from the for-itself to the for-others and from the
for-others to the for-itself. We have seen also the use which our young lady
made of our being-in-the-midst-of-the-world—ie. of our inert presence as a
passive object among other objects—in order to relieve herself suddenly from
the functions of her being-in-the-world—that is, from the being which causes
there to be a world by projecting itself beyond the world toward its own
possibilities. Let us note finally the confusing syntheses which play on the
nihilating ambiguity of these temporal ekstases, affirming at once that I am
what I have been (the man who deliberately arrests himself at one period in
his life and refuses to take into consideration the later changes) and that
I am not what I have been (the man who in the face of reproaches or rancor
dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom and on his
perpetual re-creation). In all these concepts, which have only a transitive
role in the reasoning and which are eliminated from the conclusion (like
hypochondriacs in the calculations of physicians), we find again the same
structure. We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is
not and which is not what it is.

But what
exactly is necessary in order for these concepts of disintegration to be
able to receive even a pretense of existence, in order for them to be able
to appear for an instant to consciousness, even in a process of evanescence?
A quick examination of the idea of sincerity, the antithesis of bad faith,
will be very instructive in this connection. Actually sincerity presents
itself as a demand and consequently is not a state. Now what is the ideal to
be attained in this case? It is necessary that a man be for himself only
what he is. But is this not precisely the definition of the in-itself—or if
you prefer—the principle of identity? To posit as an ideal the being of
things, is this not to assert by the same stroke that this being does not
belong to human reality and that the principle of identity, far from being a
universal axiom universally applied, is only a synthetic principle enjoying
a merely regional universality? Thus in order that the concepts of bad faith
can put us under illusion at least for an instant, in order that the candor
of "pure hearts" (cf. Gide, Kessel) can have validity for human
reality as an ideal, the principle of identity must not represent a
constitutive principle of human reality and human reality must not be
necessarily what it is but must be able to be what it is not. What does this
mean?

If man is what
he is, bad faith is forever impossible and candor ceases to be his idea and
becomes instead his being. But is man what he is? And more generally, how
can he be what he is when he exists as consciousness of being? If candor or
sincerity is a universal value, it is evident that the maxim "one must
be what one is" does not serve solely as a regulating principle for
judgments and concepts by which I express what I am. It posits not merely an
ideal of knowing but an idea of being; it proposes for us an absolute
equivalence of being with itself as a prototype of being. In this sense it
is necessary that we make ourselves what we are. But what are we then if we
have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are, if our mode of
being is having the obligation to be what we are?

Let us
consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a
little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a
step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice,
his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the
customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the
inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with
the recklessness of a tight-ropewalker by putting it in a perpetually
unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes
by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a
game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were
mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice
seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity
of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We
need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a
waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind
of marking out and investigation. The child plays with his body in order to
explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the café plays with his
condition in order to realize it. This obligation is not different from that
which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition is wholly one of
ceremony. The public demands of them that they realize it as a ceremony;
there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which
they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a
grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the
buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he
limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention
makes himself into a soldier-thing with a direct regard which does not see
at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the
interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on
(the sight "fixed at ten paces"). There are indeed many
precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual
fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly
elude his condition.

In a parallel
situation, from within, the waiter in the café cannot be immediately a café
waiter in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a
glass. It is by no means that he cannot form reflective judgments or
concepts concerning his condition. He knows well what it "means:"
the obligation of getting up at five o'clock, of sweeping the floor of the
shop before the restaurant opens, of starting the coffee pot going, etc. He
knows the rights which it allows: the right to the tips, the right to belong
to a union, etc. But all these concepts, all these judgments refer to the
transcendent. It is a matter of abstract possibilities, of rights and duties
conferred on a "person possessing rights." And it is precisely
this person who I have to be (if I am the waiter in question) and who I am
not. It is not that I do not wish to be this person or that I want this
person to be different. But rather there is no common measure between his
being and mine. It is a "representation" for others and for
myself, which means that I can be he only in representation. But if I
represent myself as him, I am not he; I am separated from him as the object
from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from
him. I cannot be he, I can only play at being him; that is, imagine to
myself that I am he. And thereby I affect him with nothingness. In vain do I
fulfill the functions of a café waiter. I can be he only in the neutralized
mode, as the actor is Hamlet, by mechanically making the typical gestures of
my state and by aiming at myself as an imaginary café waiter through those
gestures taken as an "analogue." What I attempt to realize is a
being-in-itself of the café waiter, as if it were not just in my power to
confer their value and their urgency upon my duties and the rights of my
position, as if it were not my free choice to get up each morning at five
o'clock or to remain in bed, even though it meant getting fired. As if from
the very fact that I sustain this role in existence I did not transcend it
on every side, as if I did not constitute myself as one beyond my condition.
Yet there is no doubt that I am in a sense a café waiter—otherwise could I
not just as well call myself a diplomat or a reporter? But if I am one, this
cannot be in the mode of being in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being
what I am not.

Furthermore we
are dealing with more than mere social positions; I am never anyone of my
attitudes, anyone of my actions. The good speaker is the one who plays at
speaking, because he cannot be speaking. The attentive pupil who wishes to
be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so
exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer
hearing anything. Perpetually absent to my body, to my acts, I am despite
myself that "divine absence" of which Valery speaks. I cannot say
either that I am here or that I am not here, in the sense that we say
"that box of matches is on the table"; this would be to confuse my
"being-in-the-world" with a
"being-in-the-midst-of-the-world." Nor that I am standing, nor
that I am seated; this would be to confuse my body with the idiosyncratic
totality of which it is only one of the structures. On all sides I escape
being and yet—I am.

But take a
mode of being which concerns only myself: I am sad. One might think that
surely I am the sadness in the mode of being what I am. What is the sadness,
however, if not the intentional unity which comes to reassemble and animate
the totality of my conduct? It is the meaning of this dull look with which I
view the world, of my bowed shoulders, of my lowered head, of the
listlessness in my whole body. But at the very moment when I adopt each of
these attitudes, do I not know that I shall not be able to hold on to it?
Let a stranger suddenly appear and I will lift up my head, I will assume a
lively cheerfulness. What will remain of my sadness except that I obligingly
promise it an appointment for later after the departure of the visitor?
Moreover is not this sadness itself a conduct? Is it not consciousness which
affects itself with sadness as a magical recourse against a situation too
urgent? And in this case even, should we not say that being sad means first
to make oneself sad? That may be, someone will say, but after all doesn't
giving oneself the being of sadness mean to receive this being? It makes no
difference from where I receive it. The fact is that a consciousness which
affects itself with sadness is sad precisely for this reason. But it is
difficult to comprehend the nature of consciousness; the being-sad is not a
ready-made being which I give to myself as I can give this book to my
friend. I do not possess the property of affecting myself with being. If I
make myself sad, I must continue to make myself sad from beginning to end. I
cannot treat my sadness as an impulse finally achieved and put it on file
without recreating it, nor can I carry it in the manner of an inert body
which continues its movement after the initial shock. There is no inertia in
consciousness. If I make myself sad, it is because I am not sad—the being of
the sadness escapes me by and in the very act by which I affect myself with
it. The being-in-itself of sadness perpetually haunts my consciousness of
being sad, but it is as a value which I cannot realize; it stands as a
regulative meaning of my sadness, not as its constitutive modality.

Someone may
say that my consciousness at least is, whatever may be the object or the
state of which it makes itself consciousness. But how do we distinguish my
consciousness of being sad from sadness? Is it not all one? It is true in
a way that my consciousness is) if one means by this that for another it is
a part of the totality of being on which judgments can be brought to bear.
But it should be noted, as Husserl clearly understood, that my consciousness
appears originally to the Other as an absence. It is the object always
present as the meaning of all my attitudes and all my conduct—and always
absent, for it gives itself to the intuition of another as a perpetual
question—still better, as a perpetual freedom. When Pierre looks at me, I
know of course that he is looking at me. His eyes, things in the world, are
fixed on my body, a thing in the world—that is the objective fact of which I
can say: it is. But it is also a fact in the world. The meaning of this look
is not a fact in the world, and this is what makes me uncomfortable.
Although I make smiles, promises, threats, nothing can get hold of the
approbation, the free judgment which I seek; I know that it is always
beyond. I sense it in my very attitude, which is no longer like that of the
worker toward the things he uses as instruments. My reactions, to the extent
that I project myself toward the Other, are no longer for myself but are
rather mere presentations; they await being constituted as graceful or
uncouth, sincere or insincere, etc.) by an apprehension which is always
beyond my efforts to provoke, an apprehension which will be provoked by my
efforts only if of itself it lends them force (that is, only in so far as it
causes itself to be provoked from the outside), which is its own mediator
with the transcendent. Thus the objective fact of the being-in-itself of the
consciousness of the Other is posited in order to disappear in negativity
and in freedom: consciousness of the Other is as not-being; its
being-in-itself "here and now" is not-to-be. Consciousness of the
Other is what it is not.

Furthermore
the being of my own consciousness does not appear to me as the consciousness
of the Other. It is because it makes itself, since its being is
consciousness of being. But this means that making sustains being;
consciousness has to be its own being, it is never sustained by being; it
sustains being in the heart of subjectivity, which means once again that it
is inhabited by being but that it is not being: consciousness is not what it
is.

Under these
conditions what can be the significance of the ideal of sincerity except as
a task impossible to achieve, of which the very meaning is in contradiction
with the structure of my consciousness. To be sincere, we said, is to be
what one is. That supposes that I am not originally what I am. But here
naturally Kant's "You ought, therefore you can" is implicitly
understood. I can become sincere; this is what my duty and my effort to
achieve sincerity imply. But we definitely establish that the original
structure of "not being what one is" renders impossible in advance
all movement toward being in itself or "being what one is." And
this impossibility is not hidden from consciousness; on the contrary, it is
the very stuff of consciousness; it is the embarrassing constraint which we
constantly experience; it is our very incapacity to recognize ourselves, to
constitute ourselves as being what we are. It is this necessity which means
that, as soon as we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legitimate
judgment, based on inner experience or correctly deduced from a priori or
empirical premises, then by that very positing we surpass this being-and
that not toward another being but toward emptiness, toward nothing.

How then can
we blame another for not being sincere or rejoice in our own sincerity since
this sincerity appears to us at the same time to be impossible? How can we
in conversation, in confession, in introspection, even attempt sincerity
since the effort will by its very nature be doomed to failure and since at
the very time when we announce it we have a prejudicative comprehension of
its futility? In introspection I try to determine exactly what I am, to make
up my mind to be my true self without delay—even though it means
consequently to set about searching for ways to change myself. But what does
this mean if not that I am constituting myself as a thing? Shall I determine
the ensemble of purposes and motivations which have pushed me to do this or
that action? But this is already to postulate a causal determinism which
constitutes the flow of my states of consciousness as a succession of
physical states. Shall I uncover in myself "drives," even though
it be to affirm them in shame? But is this not deliberately to forget that
these drives are realized with my consent, that they are not forces of
nature but that I lend them their efficacy by a perpetually renewed decision
concerning their value? Shall I pass judgment on my character, on my nature?
Is this not to veil from myself at that moment what I know only too well,
that I thus judge a past to which by definition my present is not subject?
The proof of this is that the same man who in sincerity posits that he is
what in actuality he was, is indignant at the reproach of another and tries
to disarm it by asserting that he can no longer be what he was. We are
readily astonished and upset when the penalties of the court affect a man
who in his new freedom is no longer the guilty person he was. But at the
same time we require of this man that he recognize himself as being this
guilty one. What then is sincerity except precisely a phenomenon of bad
faith? Have we not shown indeed that in bad faith human reality is
constituted as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is?

Let us take an
example: A homosexual frequently has an intolerable feeling of guilt, and
his whole existence is determined in relation to this feeling. One will
readily foresee that he is in bad faith. In fact it frequently happens that
this man, while recognizing his homosexual inclination, while avowing each
and every particular misdeed which he has committed, refuses with all his
strength to consider himself "a paederast." His case is always
"different," peculiar; there enters into it something of a game,
of chance, of bad luck; the mistakes are all in the past; they are explained
by a certain conception of the beautiful which women can not satisfy; we
should see in them the results of a restless search, rather than the
manifestations of a deeply rooted tendency, etc., etc. Here is assuredly a
man in bad faith who borders on the comic since, acknowledging all the facts
which are imputed to him, he refuses to draw from them the conclusion which
they impose. His friend, who is the most severe critic, becomes irritated
with this duplicity. The critic asks only one thing—and perhaps then he will
show himself indulgent: that the guilty one recognize himself as guilty,
that the homosexual declare frankly—whether humbly or boastfully matters
little—"I am a paederast." We ask here: Who is in bad faith? The
homosexual or the champion of sincerity?

The homosexual
recognizes his faults, but he struggles with all his strength against the
crushing view that his mistakes constitute for him a destiny. He does not
wish to let himself be considered as a thing. He has an obscure but strong
feeling that a homosexual is not a homosexual as this table is a table or as
this red-haired man is red-haired. It seems to him that he has escaped from
each mistake as soon as he has posited it and recognized it; he even feels
that the psychic duration by itself cleanses him from each misdeed,
constitutes for him an undetermined future, causes him to be born anew. Is
he wrong? Does he not recognize in himself the peculiar, irreducible
character of human reality? His attitude includes then an undeniable
comprehension of truth. But at the same time he need_ this perpetual
rebirth, this constant escape in order to live; he must constantly put
himself beyond reach in order to avoid the terrible judgment of collectivity.
Thus he plays on the word being. He would be right actually if he understood
the phrase, "I am not a paederast" in the sense of "I am not
what I am." That is, if he declared to himself, "To the extent
that a pattern of conduct is defined as the conduct of a paederast and to
the extent that I have adopted this conduct, I am a paederast. But to the
extent that human reality can not be finally defined by patterns of conduct,
I am not one." But instead he slides surreptitiously towards a
different connotation of the word "being." He understands
"not being" in the sense of "not-being-in-itself." He
lays claim to "not being a paederast" in the sense in which this
table is not an inkwell. He is in bad faith.

But the
champion of sincerity is not ignorant of the transcendence of human reality,
and he knows how at need to appeal to it for his own advantage. He makes use
of it even and brings it up in the present argument. Does he not wish, first
in the name of sincerity, then of freedom, that the homosexual reflect on
himself and acknowledge himself as a homosexual? Does he not let the other
understand that such a confession will win indulgence for him? What does
this mean if not that the man who will acknowledge himself as a homosexual
will no longer be the same as the homosexual whom he acknowledges being and
that he will escape into the region of freedom and of good will? The critic
asks the man then to be what he is in order no longer to be what he is. It
is the profound meaning of the saying, "A sin confessed is half
pardoned." The critic demands of the guilty one that he constitute
himself as a thing, precisely in order no longer to treat him as a thing.
And this contradiction is constitutive of the demand of sincerity. Who can
not see how offensive to the Other and how reassuring for me is a statement
such as, "He's just a paederast," which removes a disturbing
freedom from a trait and which aims at henceforth constituting all the acts
of the Other as consequences following strictly from his essence. That is
actually what the critic is demanding of his victim—that he constitute
himself as a thing, that he should entrust his freedom to his friend as a
fief, in order that the friend should return it to him subsequently—like a
suzerain to his vassal. The champion of sincerity is in bad faith to the
degree that in order to reassure himself, he pretends to judge, to the
extent that he demands that freedom as freedom constitute itself as a thing.
We have here only one episode in that battle to the death of consciousnesses
which Hegel calls "the relation of the master and the slave." A
person appeals to another and demands that in the name of his nature as
consciousness he should radically destroy himself as consciousness, but
while making this appeal he leads the other to hope for a rebirth beyond
this destruction.

Very well,
someone will say, but our man is abusing sincerity, playing one side against
the other. We should not look for sincerity in the relation of the Mit-sein
but rather where it is pure—in the relations of a person with himself. But
who cannot see that objective sincerity is constituted in the same way? Who
cannot see that the sincere man constitutes himself as a thing in order to
escape the condition of a thing by the same act of sincerity? The man who
confesses that he is evil has exchanged his disturbing
"freedom-for-evil" for an inanimate character of evil; he is evil,
he clings to himself, he is what he is. But by the same stroke, he escapes
from that thing) since it is he who contemplates it, since it depends on him
to maintain it under his glance or to let it collapse in an infinity of
particular acts. He derives a merit from his sincerity, and the deserving
man is not the evil man as he is evil but as he is beyond his evilness. At
the same time the evil is disarmed since it is nothing, save on the plane of
determinism, and since in confessing it, I posit my freedom in respect to
it; my future is virgin; everything is allowed to me.

Thus the
essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of bad faith
since the sincere man constitutes himself as what he is in order not to be
it. This explains the truth recognized by all that one can fall into bad
faith through being sincere. As Valéry pointed out, this is the case with
Stendhal. Total, constant sincerity as a constant effort to adhere to
oneself is by nature a constant effort to dissociate oneself from oneself. A
person frees himself from himself by the very act by which he makes himself
an object for himself. To draw up a perpetual inventory of what one is means
constantly to redeny oneself and to take refuge in a sphere where one is no
longer anything but a pure, free regard. The goal of bad faith, as we said,
is to put oneself out of reach; it is an escape. Now we see that we must use
the same terms to define sincerity. What does this mean?

In the final
analysis the goal of sincerity and the goal of bad faith are not so
different. To be sure, there is a sincerity which bears on the past and
which does not concern us here; I am sincere if I confess having had this
pleasure or that intention. We shall see that if this sincerity is possible,
it is because in his fall into the past, the being of man is constituted as
a being-in-itself. But here our concern is only with the sincerity which
aims at itself in present immanence. What is its goal? To bring me to
confess to myself what I am in order that I may finally coincide with my
being; in a word, to cause myself to be, in the mode of the in-itself, what
I am in the mode of "not being what I am." Its assumption is that
fundamentally I am already, in the mode of the in-itself, what I have to be.
Thus we find at the base of sincerity a continual game of mirror and
reflection, a perpetual passage from the being which is what it is to the
being which is not what it is and inversely from the being which is not what
it is to the being which is what it is. And what is the goal of bad faith?
To cause me to be what I am, in the mode of "not being what one
is," or not to be what I am in the mode of "being what one
is." We find the same game of mirrors. In fact in order for me to have
an intention of sincerity, I must at the outset simultaneously be and not be
what I am. Sincerity does not assign to me a mode of being or a particular
quality, but in relation to that quality it aims at making me pass from one
mode of being to another mode of being. This second mode of being, the ideal
of sincerity, I am prevented by nature from attaining; and at the very
moment when I struggle to attain it, I have a vague prejudicative
comprehension that I shall not attain it. But all the same, in order for me
to be able to conceive an intention in bad faith, I must have such a nature
that within my being I escape from my being. If I were sad or cowardly in
the way in which this inkwell is an inkwell, the possibility of bad faith
could not even be conceived. Not only should I be unable to escape from my
being; I could not even imagine that I could escape from it. But if bad
faith is possible by virtue of a simple project, it is because so far as my
being is concerned, there is no difference between being and non-being if I
am cut off from my project.

Bad faith is
possible only because sincerity is conscious of missing its goal inevitably,
due to its very nature. I can try to apprehend myself as ((not being
cowardly," when I am so, only on condition that the "being
cowardly" is itself "in question" at the very moment when it
exists, on condition that it is itself one question, that at the very moment
when I wish to apprehend it, it escapes me on all sides and annihilates
itself. The condition under which I can attempt an effort in bad faith is
that in one sense, I am not this coward which I do not wish to be. But if I
were not cowardly in the simple mode of not-being-what-one-is-not, I would
be "in good faith" by declaring that I am not cowardly. Thus this
inapprehensible coward is evanescent; in order for me not to be cowardly, I
must in some way also be cowardly. That does not mean that I must be "a
little" cowardly, in the sense that "a little" signifies
"to a certain degree cowardly—and not cowardly to a certain
degree." No. I must at once both be and not be totally and in all
respects a coward. Thus in this case bad faith requires that I should not be
what I am; that is, that there be an imponderable difference separating
being from non-being in the mode of being of human reality.

But bad faith
is not restricted to denying the qualities which I possess, to not seeing
the being which I am. It attempts also to constitute myself as being what I
am not. It apprehends me positively as courageous when I am not so. And that
is possible, once again, only if I am what I am not; that is, if non-being
in me does not have being even as non-being. Of course necessarily I am not
courageous; otherwise bad faith would not be bad faith. But in addition my
effort in bad faith must include the ontological comprehension that even in
my usual being what I am) I am not it really and that there is no such
difference between the being of "being-sad," for example—which I
am in the mode of not being what I am—and the "non-being" of
not-being courageous which I wish to hide from myself. Moreover it is
particularly requisite that the very negation of being should be itself the
object of a perpetual nihilation, that the very meaning of
"non-being" be perpetually in question in human reality. If I were
not courageous in the way in which this inkwell is not a table; that is, if
I were isolated in my cowardice, propped firmly against it, incapable of
putting it in relation to its opposite, if I were not capable of determining
myself as cowardly—that is, to deny courage to myself and thereby to escape
my cowardice in the very moment that I posit it—if it were not on principle
impossible for me to coincide with my not-being-courageous as well as with
my being-courageous—then any project of bad faith would be prohibited me.
Thus in order for bad faith to be possible, sincerity itself must be in bad
faith. The condition of the possibility for bad faith is that human reality,
in its most immediate being, in the intrastructure of the prereflective cogito, must be what it is not and not be what it is.

If
one wishes to better understand the Dark Ages (430-1630) then the most
suitable course of action is to turn on the television set.

—Christopher
Bek

People
for whom the power of self-awareness is poorly developed cannot grasp it as
a separate power and tend to think of it as nothing more than a slight
extension of consciousness.

—EF
Schumacher

The
fundamental question of whether light is waves or particles has never been
answered. The dual character of light is, however, only one aspect of a
deeper and more remarkable duality which pervades all nature.

—Lincoln
Barnett

What
are those potent wraiths we call space and time, without which our universe
would be inconceivable?What is
that mystic essence, matter, which exists within us and around in so many
wondrous forms; which is at once the servant and master of mind, and holds
proud rank in the hierarchy of the universe as a primary instrument of
divine creation?And what is
that swiftest of celestial messengers, radiation, which leaps the empty
vastnesses of space with lightning speed?Though true answers there can be none, science is fated to fret about
such problems.It must forever
spin tentative theories around them, seeking to entrap therewith some germ
of truth upon which to poise its intricate superstructure.The balance is delicate and every change sends tremors coursing
through the edifice to its uttermost tip.

We have
indicated for the moment only those conditions which render bad faith
conceivable, the structures of being which permit us to form concepts of bad
faith. We cannot limit ourselves to these considerations; we have not yet
distinguished bad faith from falsehood. The two-faced concepts which we have
described would without a doubt be utilized by a liar to discountenance his
questioner, although their two-faced quality being established on the being
of man and not on some empirical circumstance, can and ought to be evident
to all. The true problem of bad faith stems evidently from the fact that bad
faith is faith. It cannot be either a cynical lie or certainty—if certainty
is the intuitive possession of the object. But if we take belief as meaning
the adherence of being to its object when the object is not given or is
given indistinctly, then bad faith is belief; and the essential problem of
bad faith is a problem of belief.

How can we
believe by bad faith in the concepts which we forge expressly to persuade
ourselves? We must note in fact that the project of bad faith must be itself
in bad faith. I am not only in bad faith at the end of my effort when I have
constructed my two-faced concepts and when I have persuaded myself. In
truth, I have not persuaded myself; to the extent that I could be so
persuaded, I have always been so. And at the very moment when I was disposed
to put myself in bad faith, I of necessity was in bad faith with respect to
this same disposition. For me to have represented it to myself as bad faith
would have been cynicism; to believe it sincerely innocent would have been
in good faith. The decision to be in bad faith does not dare to speak its
name; it believes itself and does not believe itself in bad faith; it
believes itself and does not believe itself in good faith. It is this which
from the upsurge of bad faith, determines the later attitude and, as it
were, the Weltanschauung of bad faith.

Bad faith does
not hold the norms and criteria of truth as they are accepted by the
critical thought of good faith. What it decides first, in fact, is the
nature of truth. With bad faith appears a method of thinking, a type of
being which is like that of objects; the ontological characteristic of the
world of bad faith with which the subject suddenly surrounds himself is
this: that here being is what it is not, and is not what it is. Consequently
a peculiar type of evidence appears; non-persuasive evidence. Bad faith
apprehends evidence but it is resigned in advance to not being fulfilled by
this evidence, to not being persuaded and transformed into good faith. It
makes itself humble and modest; it is not ignorant, it says, that faith is
decision and that after each intuition, it must decide and will what it is.
Thus bad faith in its primitive project and in its coming into the world
decides on the exact nature of its requirements. It stands forth in the firm
resolution not to demand too much, to count itself satisfied when it is
barely persuaded, to force itself in decisions to adhere to uncertain
truths. This original project of bad faith is a decision in bad faith on the
nature of faith. Let us understand clearly that there is no question of a
reflective, voluntary decision, but of a spontaneous determination of our
being. One puts oneself in bad faith as one goes to sleep and one is in bad
faith as one dreams. Once this mode of being has been realized, it is as
difficult :to get out of it as to wake oneself up; bad faith is a type of
being in the world, like waking or dreaming, which by itself tends to
perpetuate itself, although its structure is of the metastable type. But bad
faith is conscious of its structure, and it has taken precautions by
deciding that the metastable structure is the structure of being and that
nonpersuasion is the structure of all convictions. It follows that if bad faith is faith and if it includes in its original project its
own negation (it determines itself to be not quite convinced in order to
convince itself that I am what I am not), then to start with, a faith which
wishes itself to be not quite convinced must be possible. What are the
conditions for the possibility of such a faith?

I believe that
my friend Pierre feels friendship for me. I believe it in good faith. I
believe it but I do not have for it any self-evident intuition, for the
nature of the object does not lend itself to intuition. I believe it; that
is, I allow myself to give in to all impulses to trust it; I decide to
believe in it, and to maintain myself in this decision; I conduct myself,
finally, as if I were certain of it-and all this in the synthetic unity of
one and the same attitude. This which I define as good faith is what Hegel
would call the immediate. It is simple faith. Hegel would demonstrate at
once that the immediate calls for mediation and that belief by becoming
belief for itself, passes to the state of non-belief. If I believe that my
friend Pierre likes me, this means that his friendship' appears to me as the
meaning of all his acts. Belief is a particular consciousness of the meaning
of Pierre's acts. But if I know that I believe, the belief appears to me as
pure subjective determination without external correlative. This is what
makes the very word "to believe" a term utilized indifferently to
indicate the unwavering firmness of belief ("My God, I believe in
you") and its character as disarmed and strictly subjective. ("Is
Pierre my friend? I do not know; I believe so.") But the nature of
consciousness is such that in it the mediate and the immediate are one and
the same being. To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that
one believes is no longer to believe. Thus to believe is not to believe any
longer because that is only to believe—this in the unity of one and the same
non-thetic self-consciousness. To be sure, we have here forced the
description of the phenomenon by designating it with the word to know;
non-thetic consciousness is not to know. But it is in its very translucency
at the origin of all knowing. Thus the non-thetic consciousness of believing is destructive of belief. But at the same time the very law of the
prereflective cogito implies that the being of believing ought to be the
consciousness of believing.

Thus belief is
a being which questions its own being, which can realize itself only in its
destruction, which can manifest itself to itself only by denying itself. It
is a being for which to be is to appear and to appear is to deny itself. To
believe is not-to-believe. We see the reason for it; the being of
consciousness is to exist by itself, then to make it self be and thereby to
pass beyond itself. In this sense consciousness is perpetually escaping
itself, belief becomes non-belief, the immediate becomes mediation, the
absolute becomes relative, and the relative becomes absolute. The ideal of
good faith (to believe what one believes) is, like that of sincerity (to be
what one is), an ideal of being-in-itself. Every belief is a belief that
falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes. Consequently the
primitive project of bad faith is only the utilization of this
self-destruction of the fact of consciousness. If every belief in good faith
is an impossible belief, then there is a place for every impossible belief.
My inability to believe that I am courageous will not discourage me since
every belief involves not quite believing. I shall define this impossible
belief as my belief. To be sure, I shall not be able to hide from myself
that I believe in order not to believe and that I do believe in order to
believe. But the subtle, total annihilation of bad faith by itself cannot
surprise me; it exists at the basis of all faith. What is it then? At the
moment when I wish to believe myself courageous I know that I am a coward.
And this certainly would come to destroy my belief. But first, I am not any
more courageous than cowardly, if we are to understand this in the mode of
being of the-in-itself. In the second place, I do not know that I am
courageous; such a view of myself can be accompanied only by belief, for it
surpasses pure reflective certitude. In the third place, it is very true
that bad faith does not succeed in believing what it wishes to believe. But
it is precisely as the acceptance of not believing what it believes that it
is bad faith. Good faith wishes to flee the
"not-believing-what-one-believes" by finding refuge in being. Bad
faith flees being by taking refuge in
"not-believing-what-one-believes." It has disarmed all beliefs in
advance—those which it would like to take hold of and, by the same stroke,
the others, those which it wishes to flee. In willing this self-destruction
of belief, from which science escapes by searching for evidence, it ruins
the beliefs which are opposed to it, which reveal themselves as being only
belief. Thus we can better understand the original phenomenon of bad faith.

In bad faith
there is no cynical lie nor knowing preparation for deceitful concepts. But
the first act of bad faith is to flee what it can not flee, to flee what it
is. The very project of flight reveals to bad faith an inner disintegration
in the heart of being, and it is this disintegration which bad faith wishes
to be. In truth, the two immediate attitudes which we can take in the face
of our being are conditioned by the very nature of this being and its
immediate relation with the in-itself. Good faith seeks to flee the inner
disintegration of my being in the direction of the in-itself which it should
be and is not. Bad faith seeks to flee the in-itself by means of the inner
disintegration of my being. But it denies this very disintegration as it
denies that it is itself bad faith. Bad faith seeks by means of
"not-being-what-one-is" to escape from the in-itself which I am
not in the mode of being what one is not. It denies itself as bad faith and
aims at the in-itself which I am not in the mode of
"not-being-what-one-is-not." If bad faith is possible, it is
because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human
being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of
bad faith. The origin of this risk is the fact that the nature of
consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not and not to be what it
is. In the light of these remarks we can approach the ontological study of
consciousness, not as the totality of the human being, but as the
instantaneous nucleus of this being.